Wednesday, November 28, 2012

I've been thinking about Yvonne B's forlorn and ghostly shot of the corner of 17th Street and 10th Avenue in the 1980s. There's the abandoned High Line and a gritty little luncheonette, alone with a single-story garage. There are no people.

And here's my shot of the same corner today. The luncheonette is now a Comme des Garcons "concept store." The High Line is renovated and full of tourists enjoying the views from what they call "10th Avenue Square." The garage has been demolished for a luxury condo tower with an Equinox fitness center on the first floor.

The streets below are not unpopulated--there are a couple of people making cell-phone calls, two women pushing a shopping cart, and a Skyliner bus full of tourists.

The first scene brings to mind some lines from "Minority Report," a sort of love poem to America by John Updike:

Updike could have been writing about New York City, in the late mid-century, amid the pleasures of urban decay. And I can't help but look at these two photos and wonder: What possible love poem could be written today about high-concept boutiques, high-tech gym goers, and High-Line tourists cramming the so-called 10th Avenue Square for a photo op?

14 comments:

Every once in a while, you post an old photo that makes me remember what the city used to be, and it breaks my heart. Every goddamn time. But the feeling of the time that it brings back to me...well, thanks for helping me feel that again, if only for a minute.

Your clean lines and panesFilled with the finest people and feelingsSo much money you breatheOut into the streets freshly trodby boots that cost enoughto feed a familythe soulless eyes so brightthe maker's hearts so coldstill I smell what I thoughtI missed behindall the luxurythe fragrance of dogshitand rotting garbage and piss

As a photographer, I can see a wealth of photographic opportunity in the older picture: close-ups, details, signage, the entire building on its corner.

In the newer photo, I see absolutely nothing of any artistic value. Its sterile, antiseptic, devoid of all soul. I wouldn't even bother taking my camera out. How fitting that the inhabitants are shallow and empty, as well.

O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal humanity,How often your Re-volution has proven but E-volutionRoll’d again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity!~Beautiful City, Alfred Lord Tennyson

I had to expand the second photograph before I realized that it WASN'T a slick architectural rendering, replete with becarriaged moms and sullen hipsters watching the dirty traffic from within their fishbowl perch.

gabriel, "photographically" the new version is lacking. but i still fail to see anything wrong w/what they did. its not an ugly strip mall, NOT a walmart, subway, cell phone stores, home depot, 4ever21, zara-thank god. (if hunrads of people lost their homes w/out being relocated, i might have a complaint). new york still can be beautiful, the high line IS, the old building IS. this post made me happy, that dosnt happen too often.

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